BuzzFeed writer Benny Johnson fired for plagiarism

Ravi Somaiya

BuzzFeed, a news website focused on popular online material, dismissed one of its writers on Friday after finding 41 instances of "sentences or phrases copied word for word from other sites" among the 500 stories he had written, said the site's editor-in-chief, Ben Smith.

The writer, Benny Johnson, 28, was the site's viral politics editor and specialised in list-based articles about political news with headlines like "24 Delightful Inauguration Firsts."

"Starting this Wednesday," Mr Smith wrote in an apology posted on the site, "Twitter users began pointing out instances in which a BuzzFeed writer, Benny Johnson, had lifted phrases and sentences from other websites." When Johnson's work was initially questioned, Smith stood by him. But after a review of his work, Smith said, "we had no choice other than letting him go". The offending articles have been corrected and an editor's note has been added to each, Mr Smith said.

BuzzFeed has tried to mix established journalists - it recently hired Chris Hamby, who won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting this year for work he did with the Center for Public Integrity - with writers who specialise in the lists and other items that account for the bulk of the site's traffic.

When the site started seven years ago, Mr Smith said, it was not held to traditional journalistic standards because it was not producing journalism. But it now has "scores of aggressive reporters around the United States and the world, holding the people we cover to high standards. We must - and we will - hold ourselves to the same high standards".

Most of the examples of Johnson's plagiarism seemed to be phrases copied from publications like US News & World Report, The Hill and The Guardian. Some people used social media to note that Mr Johnson had campaigned against others who plagiarised. "Repeat after me," he wrote in a Twitter message this week, accusing another site of taking one of his stories. "Copying and pasting someone's work is called 'plagiarism.'"

On Saturday, as news of his dismissal spread, Mr Johnson, who joined BuzzFeed in early 2013, issued an apology on Twitter. "To the writers who were not properly attributed and anyone who ever read my byline, I am sincerely sorry," he wrote.